I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

Sit down and pull up a chair, I'm about to give a rant. I can't remember if I've ranted about this subject before, but I'm about to do so now.

This rant is brought to you by a few comments on a YouTube video which... well, the video was looking at blood-glucose levels as related to things like breakfast and drinking coffee. That was fine, the original video was sufficiently qualified in its statements and was interesting. But then someone in the comments mentioned they were diabetic and immediately some well-meaning person replied "Look into resistance training".

No. Just no.

It doesn't matter how helpful a person intends to be, all unasked-for advice is unhelpful. Why? Because it isn't advice, it is criticism. It says "Why haven't you done whatever-it-is?" It says "Your problems are easily solved and therefore trivial". It says "You are stupid/ignorant/lazy because you haven't fixed it already with this simple solution". It says "Your suffering is your own fault."

These pieces of medical advice are always given by people who are not qualified in medicine. Medical professionals know better than to give advice when they don't know the details of the condition. Especially not advice to random people on the internet that they've never met. And even non-medically speaking, anyone who is an expert in something (and I speak as a computer expert, okay?), anyone who is good at solving problems, they aren't going to toss out suggestions without asking questions first. Because the more you know about a field, the more you are aware that things that may seem similar on the surface can be quite different from each other once you know a few more details. A one-word description of the problem doesn't cut it.

And yet some people jump in as soon as they hear the words "diabetes" or "obesity" or "sleep apnoea" or "insomnia" or....

Who do you think you are, random advice-giver? Who are you to tell me what to do? You know-nothing ignoramus, you don't know a thing about me, what gives you the idea that you can solve my problems? I did not ask for your patronising condescension, you useless busy-body! If I'd wanted advice, I would have explicitly asked for it.

Don't be that person. Next time you feel the urge to pass on something you read in a magazine, or something that worked for you but might not work for everybody... take a deep breath and ask yourself, "Did this person actually ask for advice, or did they just mention their state of being?"

It looks as if my relatively newly acquired scanner is utter crap. Yes, I've had it for months, but I haven't used it all that often... and now it looks as if it was always crappy, comparing the result I'm getting this evening with scans that I did in January (when I first got the scanner). Blast!

The crappiness consists of these "stripey" artefacts in the preview and the scan, as if the light was shaded by blinds and giving it these shadows. I have no idea what would be causing it, but it's there in all my scans. The reason I didn't pay attention to it before was because, when I was scanning my Snape necklace in January, I was more concerned that I wasn't getting the Labradorite right, so I fell back on taking photographs. The stripes happened in the scan of my spiral necklace too, but I didn't realize it wasn't just in the preview until recently when I looked at that image again (because I wanted a picture of a Spiral-6-in-1 weave).

But this means that the scanner is UTTERLY USELESS to me, since the only thing I use it for is to take pictures of my jewellery. My old HP Scanjet 5p was perfect for that, until, after um, twenty years (!) it developed a yellow stripe down one side. Obviously HP don't build them like they used to (the new scanner is a HP as well).

Crap. Crap. Crap.

Taking photographs is much more hassle. With scanning, I could (in the past) get good results whether it was day or night - and it was much more likely to be night when I finished a work and wanted to scan it. With photographs, no matter how hard I try, the only really good results happen if I take photos in daylight, outside, on a sunny day. Which doesn't happen that often.

Bother. Botheration. Botherectomy!

Gah! I've been looking through the amplificathon archives - why is 90% of podfic slash? (!!!???) I'm currently on "skip=100" on the "archived" tag and I have found three stories which aren't slash, in fandoms I know. Four if you count the one which I already got from elsewhere.
All the Sherlock podfic there is John/Sherlock.
All the ST:Reboot podfic there is Jim/Spock.
All the Harry Potter podfic there is either Harry/Draco or Harry/Snape.
Then we have the huge amount of Supernatural slash. And the Avengers slash. And the Merlin slash. And the Inception slash. And the RPF slash. And the fandoms-I'd-never-heard-of-before slash (e.g. Teen Wolf). And of course the one single Man From UNCLE story was... slash.
Oh, I think there was one Magnificent 7 gen story. And, astonishingly, one Supernatural gen story. But I don't follow Mag7 or SPN.
(sigh)

Maybe I need to learn how to make podfic. But I have so many other things I want to do instead. (sigh)

I can't remember where I heard the following quip, but I think it rather fitting, considering how the (female) keynote speaker for OSCON is now getting hostile and patronizing comments from (male) commenters here.

Q: Why are there so few women in Open Source?
A: Because there are so many jerks.

I have mentioned previously that my desktop (server) is quite sick, going up and down like a yo-yo (though it's been better today and yesterday, probably because the weather has been cooler). The day I got back from NZ, I ordered a replacement computer online.
( but wait, there's more! )
Moral of the story: do not make purchases online when one is spaced out from exhaustion because one had to get up at 4am to fly home from overseas.